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Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

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Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#961

Post by adnjoo »

jamalaramala wrote: post #766

Another point to consider: the environmental impact of having hundreds of thousands of people commuting to work every day. Transport is the second most important source of greenhouse gas emissions, after electricity and heat. I'm not sure if large office spaces are more energy efficient than home offices.

ironic since one of their LPs is Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility

> We must be humble and thoughtful about even the secondary effects of our actions. Our local communities, planet, and future generations need us to be better every day.

https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-...:

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#962

Post by princevegeta89 »

thousand_nights wrote: post #22

i can't believe how out of touch some of these rich corporate execs are, as if everyone's aim in life should be to pour every ounce of their energy to make some massive trillion dollar corporation even richer this capitalistic yearn for endless growth is such a parasitic meat grinder they write these memos with "touching" stories, i started from the bottom here, 27 years, amazon is my life, blah blah, as if anyone, p…

Exactly... we don't need the fucking nonsense of how he made an agreement with his wife on a napkin and other personal shit in his life.

Not getting to the point promptly enough and painting the message to look better only makes it much worse.

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#963

Post by koinedad »

An experience I’m familiar with: 1. Hired fully remote to virtual location etc. 2. A few months after joining RTO (return to office) enforced even though I’m not technically returning 3. About a year later RTH (return to team hub) announced with about 1 month for internal transfer or move to Seattle with in a few months. 4. Roughly 2 months later 5 days a week announced.

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#965

Post by algebra-pretext »

jwmoz wrote: post #912

More importantly, is anyone here from Amazon quitting over this? What's your response?

Purely observation from team members leaving and browsing the #remote-advocacy channel over the last two years, but the 3-day mandate and the relocations have already pushed most people who can (and want to) quit, to quit.

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#966

Post by hn72774 »

downrightmike wrote: post #947
monch1962 wrote: post #789

I work for a consulting company in Melbourne Australia. The Melbourne city council has started petitioning the government to force govt employees to return to the CBD for work. Their reasoning is that CBD-based businesses are somehow entitled to pre-COVID customer levels, which means employees need to start coming into the CBD more often. Apparently this is getting serious consideration. It's not like we home-based w…

The internet has allowed remote work for a long time, and in office work was dead walking until the pandemic finally put it in the ground. It needs to stay dead. These local shops don't deserve to lose their business either. if the CBD businesses want to compete, then they need to move. This is a sunk cost. You don't throw good money after bad

I think a big part of this math is avoiding huge balance sheet write downs on unoccupied real estate.

When Amazon was heavily investing in SLU in the 2010's they purchased all of their leased offices from the developer, Paul Allen's company.

It's the GE-ification of Amazon. Financial engineering with little care about employees or customers.

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#967

Post by whimsicalism »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #829
monch1962 wrote: post #789

I work for a consulting company in Melbourne Australia. The Melbourne city council has started petitioning the government to force govt employees to return to the CBD for work. Their reasoning is that CBD-based businesses are somehow entitled to pre-COVID customer levels, which means employees need to start coming into the CBD more often. Apparently this is getting serious consideration. It's not like we home-based w…

> Their reasoning is that CBD-based businesses are somehow entitled to pre-COVID customer levels It's more like downtown property prices are based on those levels, and property is leveraged, and if banks collapse do to commercial property prices plummeting, you're in for a bad time. Also, although downtown is a very small part of the city - in many cities, downtown property taxes make up a relatively large chunk of t…

I’m not in for a bad time, the banks are in for a bad time.

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#968

Post by RHSeeger »

kwanbix wrote: post #757
mrweasel wrote: post #732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Eliminating 2 hours a day of driving and train rides left me with more energy I can expend on my work! Companies forget this. I have had coworkers quit because they couldn't deal with transport. One got stressed out of his mind because our office was close to motorway which frequently has accidents and if that happened he might not be able to pick up the kids on time. Others had to leave clients hanging because the…

I know this might be an "unpopular opinion," but after working fully remote for three years, I found myself feeling really down. I felt like a prisoner in my own home. So, three months ago, I started a new job with an office that’s 45 minutes away, and I’ve been going in every day—and I couldn't be happier! I do have the option to work from home all days if I want, but honestly, I prefer going to the office. Now, I g…

> I know this might be an "unpopular opinion,"

That's the thing, though; it's important to remember that it very much _is_ an opinion/preference. For some people, working from the office is better, for others, it's working from home, and for others it's a combination of both. There are positives and negatives to each, for both the employee and the employer.

That being said, a company limiting itself to _only_ people willing to work in the office is doing just that; limiting itself. I expect the reverse is also true; but the pool of workers to choose from for "everyone remote" is a _LOT_ bigger than the pool of workers for "everyone in the office".

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#969

Post by valbaca »

Peroni wrote: post #794
james_woods wrote: post #768

Citing an article from MIT Sloan Management Review: "But there’s no clear evidence that these mandates improve financial performance. A recent study of S&P 500 companies that was conducted by University of Pittsburgh researchers found that executives are “using RTO mandates to reassert control over employees and blame employees as a scapegoat for bad firm performance.” Those policies result in “significant declines i…

>When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant. >we’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; They believe there are advantages to being fully in-office because they have observed these things. Zero mention of actual data to back up their beliefs and observations despite…

“Data-driven culture” until a board full of Boomers just kind of feels differently

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#970

Post by mihaaly »

mrweasel wrote: post #732
ryukoposting wrote: post #490

As a firmware engineer, my job demands more "in-office-y" stuff than most other engineers on HN. I have specialized equipment. Hardware. I need to interface with manufacturing. So on. Guess what? I'm going on 1 year fully remote, and I'm doing great! Turns out, all that fancy equipment can be brought home with you. We deal with a contract manufacturer, and emailing them from home is no harder than emailing them from…

> Eliminating 2 hours a day of driving and train rides left me with more energy I can expend on my work! Companies forget this. I have had coworkers quit because they couldn't deal with transport. One got stressed out of his mind because our office was close to motorway which frequently has accidents and if that happened he might not be able to pick up the kids on time. Others had to leave clients hanging because the…

Also 2 x 60m commuting + 15-45m (depending on circumstances) of preparation for the office before leaving. So much waste of one's life!

I was steering myself towards remote work since it was technically unfeasible. I worked from home in the late 90's setting up a removable hard drive with data and two computers taking that (office + home), but that WFH was beyond the 40h / week, I had to go in 9 to 5 still. I liked the tasks, so it was exciting.

Then technology improved, chose a position where the pay was only acceptable but I had the chance of working from different places, city, country, so no chance of going in to the office! This was the 2010's.

Then chose an on-site work in a rich country so after getting to know and trust each other I'd have the theoretical possibility of working from a cheap country remotely on a very good salary (or something between the two for mutual benefit). Unluckily I had a stoneheaded and actually very incompetent COO coming from decades of secretarial position in a uni unable to comprehend working elsewhere than in an allocated (rubbish) chair at a particular (rubbish) desk in a cheap office (being cold in winter so my poor female colleagues sat in coats) far from amenities, from 9 to 5. This was her sole understanding what work is, the poor soul. So after some time trying (suffering, fighting) for remote dominant settings I handed in my resignation (they headed a wall anyway with that poor incompetent COO) into the nothing. Having some months of rest before picking up something new. That was 2019 December. Oi! : )

Now I work with colleagues - working on the very same codebase - from 3 continents spanning 18h of time zones, most of them never met. This is nice!

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